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Allegorically, Bedroom - EP

by Monarcadia

supported by
Colin Keating
Colin Keating thumbnail
Colin Keating Monarcadia has been making some of the most innovative and groundbreaking synth-pop/experimental/who-even-knows kinda work for a long time now. Give "The Dark Singular" a listen and let him know what you think.
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1.
Shmymphony 04:28
I can't see who's watching galaxies. I can't see anything through you with you. Let's just stay here. I can't walk about things. Do you see? See me? See me? You can't see me.
2.
Defriended 05:05
What if I say I'm gonna find a way out of you? One of these days I'm gonna fly away when and if you're there. And I'm sorry but I've got to go. I hate to say this but my stock in you has been sold. I wonder why I'm always all alone. Wonder if you'll ever care. Wonder if you ever cared like you said you did. Go down, away from myself. When will I change, find a way out of me? When will I save myself from this state? Couldn't get out of bed I wished I'd fade away. (We carry on in the night.) I'm sick of the back door and I've thrown away my life. (We'd carry on every night.) My life.
3.
I can't see what I don't know I FREAK OUT. I don't see what I don't know I FREAK OUT. I don't see what I don't feel I FREAK OUT. I can't see you, I can't free you, I can't feel you: I'm dead. You'll see. I don't know what I can see I FREAK OUT I can feel what I can't feel and FREAK OUT When you go outside you see a LITTLE ONE LIKE ME AND I CAN SEE YOU FREAK OUT We're watching you. I don't sleep.
4.
Transcription of Colin's original voicemail to me: "...I I just I can't get off the darkness thing it's super weird haha it's literally everywhere, and I'm getting pissed off because...now, my poetic imagination is thinking about how it's a perfect metaphor for everything?? because ok like bear with me here: you are...alone, essentially. You...are born into a body...that you don't...really know...and that frightens you, and, you're, you know, that, it itself is frightened of you and your mind and your body don't really connect in a way. And so you're just sort of this vessel this like empty car that's just sort of going down a street, this, like, dark street, in this weird clustered neighborhood of things but it's totally dark, and, ah, you can see the stars and you can see the planes so you know that far off in the distance, there are people doing normal things and going to their jobs and like, breathing, haha you know? just doing normal day to day life things but you are still there, like you are still alone. Walking along the streets. In the dark. And it's not necessarily... dangerous, because the absence of people is just so evident there's absolutely no one out there: it's just you. You see the lights on in the houses, but there's no one in the windows. You...see the cars on the driveway, but there's no one getting things out there's this--it's almost like the town has been abandoned. I'm walking by the post office right now and ah...it's the same...it's the same thing this is freaking me the fuck out man. There's like 4 empty cars--there's no one out. It's sunday night...in this little suburb on the river...and there's no one out, I'm the only one out..............What am I doing here?"
5.
Kind of Life 06:38
And if I find a different kind of life, I want it to breathe a stranger thing than truth. Want to be you? When can I choose to hate you, darling? Argue for blood, and all you get is a sepia photo. I can't design the way. I realize death's too certain to wait. I can't disguise the day. I feel so much I get really lame. I need a reason. I need a reason to care. When I find that different kind of life, I want it to be strange, baby rearrange me. Want to be me? Why don't you dream and be crazy? Argue for love, and all you get is your old dirty ways. I can't design the way. I realize death's too certain to wait. I can't disguise the day. I feel so much I get really lame. I need a reason. I need a reason to care. When she's not in my life I don't care about life.

about

At this stage I've literally become a "bedroom" artist, because I made this album--and those preceding this--in bedrooms. I find it funny when people use the word "literally" as an unnecessary emphasizer, so, as a joke, various friends and I will substitute words like "figuratively," "metaphorically," or, in this case, "allegorically," for equally ridiculous and unnecessary emphasis. So the genre of this music is allegorically bedroom.

This EP was born from a weekend of housesitting in Albuquerque, NM for my friend Marisol. I told her I was thinking about using the time to record music in her home and she had no problem with this.

Shortly after mastering and releasing Lunar Affair, my MacBook Pro of almost 6 years suddenly fried. And I mean literally fried: parts of the logic board had melted from overheating and the computer became, sadly, inoperable. Given that I had relied on a laptop to record my music and I had zero money, this was just about the worst thing that could happen. I'm still mourning--funny how personal of bonds we form with our technology these days!

I looked into other modes of recording, namely iOS apps. The FourTrack Multitrack Recorder app was recommended to me by a friend a few years ago, so I decided that I would accept the low-fi quality and just record with that. With any songs involving electric guitar, keyboard, or sampler, I used my guitar amplifier and positioned the iPhone next to the amplifier, allowing the phone's internal microphone to pick up the sound with minimal interference.

If you ever look at the FourTrack app, you'll see that editing tracks is pretty much out of the question, with the only possible post-tracking modifications including volume adjustment, and a transport wheel underneath that allows some basic positioning of a new recording's start point within the song's overall time. To avoid the inevitable frustration of fiddling with this dial and worrying about multiple takes, some of these songs were built ahead of time; some were built as they were recorded, much like a linear tape recording--a small bit on one track, followed by another section, maybe some layering on a second track, maybe mixing back down from four tracks to two tracks, etc. I have to say I found this liberating after the overwhelming capability of a DAW like Logic Pro; I felt that I was returning to the most basic form of recording, which allowed me to emphasize freely playing and improvising much more than before. The part of me that aligns with and champions the punk/DIY ethos was really satisfied by this process for its simplicity and immediacy. No production, just recording ideas and creating quickly.


NOTES ON CONTENT/PRODUCTION:


Shmymphony

This was one of the songs that used the FourTrack app as a writing tool; the song was built bit by bit within the app, and slowly became this multilayered...thing. This song includes my voice routed through the Marshall amp's onboard delay on one track, drum sounds and some kind of synth patch on my keyboard on two other tracks, keyboard piano patch on another track, and improvised acoustic guitar over it. I called it "Shmymphony" because it was a new way of recording and songwriting for me, and when I made it I thought of it as classical composition in an untrained, low-income, DIY, punk kind of way, I guess. But then I thought that was silly and wanted to make fun of my own seriousness, because whatever.


Defriended

"Defriended" is, of course, a reference to the facebook action.
You may notice the same loop here as I used in both "Celibate" (bonus track on Don't, Don't) and "He Say No Buddy Call" (Lunar Affair), but played in reverse and in a different key at a different tempo. The song is four tracks: sampler (chordal loop, bass sample and clicking sample, plus drum beats) on one, guitar on two, and two layers of vocals on three and four. In a better recording situation, I would have separated the various parts coming from the sampler, but I was going for expediency here, and the samples would have been out of sync if not played by understanding the sampler as one instrument. I built the drum loops using my familiar method of live-looping keyboard patches and recording these loops into my sampler. There are two loops in there (a bass that sounds like a rubber band maybe, and a kind of rhythmic sound that taps with some kind of washy sound behind it) that I captured during some of my improvisations leading up to this EP and decided to use as rhythmic guides in this song; I'm not sure about the exact sources of these sounds aside from that, though. The guitar parts were improvised.


Buried in the Yard

While I was watching her house, Marisol's dog Lito escaped the front yard and got run over while I was housesitting. I called Marisol and apologized profusely to her, and her neighbor scooped up Lito's body with a shovel, put him in a trash bag and a cardboard box, and helped me bury the dog the next day in Marisol's front yard. I felt haunted by that little dog for the next 24 hours that I was watching the house, and wrote this song from the post-mortem perspective of the dog. The "I don't sleep" is both in the dog's voice and my own, because I felt spooked in that house and couldn't sleep well anyway. The percussion is me tapping on a table. I routed my voice through a pitch shifter and maintained mostly an even wet/dry balance.


The Dark Singular (feat. Young Hound)

My brother Colin called me at some point while I was recording and left me a very existentialist voicemail while he was walking through the suburbs of Portland, OR. I totally loved it and thought of it as a perfect addition to the album, which I believed had a lot to do with themes of loneliness/isolation. I sampled bits from the voicemail, used a pitch-shifted (and tempo-shifted) drum+keyboard loop as the foundation, and then played the sampler like an instrument to bring in bits of the voicemail. I improvised guitar over this through some delay. To me this sounds like a kind of wandering hopeless solitude in the middle of a desert. I particularly love the repetitions of "you are....alone" and "what am I doing here?"


Kind of Life

A song about dreaming and escape, wishing for something different. Made with loops that I built on my keyboard and sampler. Maybe one day I'll re-record this and "Defriended," which are my two favorites on this whole EP.

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credits

released June 27, 2014

Alaric López: all vocals, guitars, sampler, keyboard, pedals.

Colin Keating (Young Hound): voicemail sampled in track 4 (The Dark Singular).

Biggest thank you to Marisol for asking me to house sit for her, knowing full well that I would transform her bedroom into a mini recording studio while she was away. Thank you to Sugar the albino boxer dog for being my companion during this time.

Thanks, Mom, for letting me use your computer to upload this EP to Bandcamp.

RIP Lito.

Cover art and logo design by Alaric López.

All songs written, recorded, performed, and mixed by Alaric López in a makeshift home studio in Albuquerque, NM on a weekend in June 2014 using an iPhone 5, the iPhone's internal microphone, and FourTrack Multitrack Recorder for iOS.

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Monarcadia

Monarcadia is musician, intermedia artist, and poet Alaric López.

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Since 2012

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